Watched
by Asher21790
Summary: Jyn spots Cassian in the cantina on the rebel base, and against all her better instincts, follows him.


A sort of kind of re-imagining of Overtired, with a slightly different timeline from a slightly different viewpoint. (How conceited, to re-imagine your own stories)  
Reviews are most welcomed.

* * *

She very quietly walks herself back to the bunk, goes inside, and sits down silently.  
Her shoulders are bunched somewhere near her ears and her fists are clenched so tight her nails bite into her palms. When she pries them open, looking down, she sees half-moon crescents carved into her skin.  
It's really none of her business.  
Nothing to do with her.  
At all.  
 _So why does it bother her so much?_

xxXXxx

They had been highly strung since their charged up fight on departure from Eadu.  
Jyn had trusted him.  
She thought he trusted her.  
On Jedha - rather, after Jedha - he had looked at her with kindness in his eyes, soft and dark, and she had felt a strange little tug in her stomach that she hadn't felt for years and years.  
It was nice to see a compassionate set of eyes looking at you.  
It was nice to feel like you were on common ground.  
She had been alone for so long ... so long.  
Then Eadu happened and she'd felt wounded. Hurt.  
 _How could he?  
_ More aptly, how could _she?_ She lad let herself believe that he could have blindly followed her. Believed her.  
She let herself be fooled by a spy's mask and a nice set of eyes.  
 _(She'll admit that much. Nice eyes)  
_ The anger she felt for herself had boiled over when she confronted him, she projected it all onto him. All that hurt and rage.  
Yes, she was wounded. Her father had just been killed. But if she was fair, and truthful, she had said goodbye to her father years ago. His sudden reappearance in her life, if only for a brief fleeting moment before his death, had been like a phantom throb of pain in a long amputated limb. Horrible, _painful_ , but manageable. Another death in a lifetime full of them.  
It was the culmination of all this; the mission, their loss, their barely orchestrated escape, the looming threat of the death star ... the crushing weight of the responsibility, which caused her to lash out.  
They had circled around each other like animals, sizing each other up. She hit out, he returned.  
When they'd landed back on Yavin she'd slunk away to her bunk, planning on avoiding him until the following morning when the Rebel Council would meet.  
If it had been up to her she would have called the Council to assemble right then and there, hour of the night be damned, but the meeting was convened for 0600 the following morning, giving her at least seven hours to catch up on sleep.

Only ... she cant sleep. She is jacked up and on edge and she needs some thing to dull her mind, just a bit. Just to take the edge off.  
She had seen the Rebel's excuse for a cantina, before they had left for Jedha. A little lean-to behind the mess-hall. Every rebel base has one. Even Saw's men used to set them up. She wanders through the barracks, following the din noise of rebels letting loose, until she finds it again. She takes her glass of liquor, something akin to whiskey, a muddy brown liquid that smells like rocket-fuel, and finds herself a shadowy corner to sit in.  
She relishes the feeling of being surrounded by crowds but also somewhat invisible. No one there knows her. They pay her no mind, and she is able to sit, unattended to, nursing her drink and the growing warmth it was leaving in her chest, her head.

After a short time, she spots him, strolling in, straight to the bar.  
He chats with the woman server easily and makes small-talk with the various rebels who pass him. No one seems to want to talk shop here, their conversations were short, lighthearted.  
He looks more relaxed, more natural. His movements are languid and his posture casual, but he still retains that sharp eyed look, and she knows he is taking in every detail around him, cataloguing it away.  
She sinks further into her chair, further into her little corner of the tent, as his eyes scan the crowd.  
 _Looking for her?_  
She follows the direction of his gaze ... and answers the question for herself.  
Jyn clutches her glass a little tighter as she watches the woman he nods at bruskly, leave her group of friends, fellow rebels engrossed in a card game, and amble towards Cassian.  
She was about Jyn's height, with skin the colour of Cassian's and long, thick braids hanging messily over her shoulders.  
Jyn frowns, trying to make out what they are saying. She sees him reach out and run a hand down the woman's arm.  
She's distracted momentarily when a scuffle breaks out between a group of rebels to her right, chairs tottering over as they shove each other, and when she looks back, the woman and Cassian are gone.

And this is where Jyn goes wrong.  
She could have just finished her drink in peace, tottled back to her bunk and collapsed, half-drunk and comfortable, and had a decent night's sleep.  
But she's never been one to make sensible decisions. Why should she start now? Especially when she's full of liquid courage?

She drains her glass and stands slowly, carefully, and tries to walk as casually as she can from the cantina.  
It's not hard to find them. They haven't bothered being particularly coy.  
Despite that, and despite the righteous burn in her chest, she isn't entirely prepared for what she sees.  
They've ducked away into an alcove, to the side of the main mess-hall in a void area in the temple, its bathed only in a swathe of moonlight, cutting over the temple wall, but it shines down in a beam, leaving everything else in the shadows. Jyn presses herself against a cool stone wall in the shadowy area.  
Cassian's back is bare, a wide swathe of skin facing Jyn. It's marred by criss-crosses of scars cutting across the muscle, pink and raised, some of them near-white with age. His shirt hangs from his pants where it is barely tucked in, hanging as his hips move.  
She cant see much of the woman, just flashes of the skin of her bare legs, and her hair ...  
But it is the bare expanse of Cassian's back that she can't look away from.  
The movement of his hips. The muscle in his arms, his shoulders, his back, moving, sliding under olive skin, the scars on his back, across his shoulders rolling with the movement.  
His breath is tight and ragged, and her own breath is caught in her throat. Jyn feels the burn in her chest move lower into her belly as it coils into a steadily building heat.  
Cassian groans, his voice strangled and tight as he speaks.

"Slower ... no _... slower._ "

It comes out in a growl that resonates through Jyn, hits her straight in her stomach where that heat is being stoked into a fire.  
She gasps ...  
... and immediately wants to kick herself.  
She presses against the wall, and Cassian momentarily glances over his shoulder. His eyes are wide, wild, and she holds her breath. She's sure he can hear her heartbeat, pounding in her chest.  
She's _sure_ he can hear it. See her.  
 _Kriff,_ what in _hells_ will she say? How can she explain this away?  
It seems like a lifetime passes in that split-second, but the woman he's with grabs his head, her fingers knotting in his hair as she pulls him to her.  
Jyn screams at herself silently, commanding first her eyes to tear away, and then her legs to move. She tests a boot slowly, placing it down, lingering on her toes. It doesn't make a sound, so she tries the other one. And the next, and the next and the next. All the way to her room.  
She doesn't come down off tip-toe until her door has hissed closed behind her.  
She sits on her bed, suddenly sober, and breathes for what seems like the first time since she left the cantina.

She rolls her shoulders back, examines her palms where her nails have bitten into her.  
None of her business.  
Nothing to do with her.  
At all.

" _Kriff_ ," she says to the empty room.

She feels like laughing. She does. It bounces around the room, flat and strange.

She strips off and stands under the shower, slowly turning the warm water off, measure by measure, until it's streaming over her, completely cold, as she attempts to dampen the fire running across her heated skin.


End file.
